Tag Archives: University of Missouri

Many factors have been suggested to explain the explosion in Black protest and Black rage over the past two years on college campuses and in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee: racist police, insensitive college administrators, bigoted White students, pervasive “micro-aggressions,” the stigma-creating effect of racial preference policies, among others.

But most such factors fail to answer the crucial “why now?” question. It is a fundamental principle of social science analysis, as well as of simple common sense, that change cannot be adequately explained by a “constant.” If the price of gasoline goes up it is not much of an explanation to say that the gas station owners and the oil companies must be trying to earn more profit. Under a free market system market participants are almost always trying to maximize their profits, so if gasoline prices rise (or fall) some other factor besides changes in profit motive must be responsible for the price increase or decrease.

Almost all of the factors typically mentioned to explain recent racial upheavals are “constants” that existed just as much — or to a greater degree — five, ten, or twenty years ago. There is no credible evidence that America’s police have become more racist, that White college students are more bigoted or more “micro-aggressive” than they used to be, that college administrators and college presidents are more insensitive to Black concerns, or that there has been an increase in hostility to Black aspirations either on college campuses or in America’s cities. Something clearly has changed, but it is not to be found in the factors most commentators have focused upon.

What clearly has changed is the level of Black frustration and disappointment in the closing years of Barack Obama’s administration. And to explain it we must understand what is sometimes called the “Tocqueville Effect” and what social scientists in the 1950s began to describe as frustration born of an unfulfilled “revolution of rising expectations.” Whatever else one might say about Barack Obama’s two victories in his campaigns for the U.S. presidency, they raised the hope, pride, and aspirations of tens of millions of Black Americans in addition to that of many non-Blacks as well. “Hope and change” was the dominant theme of his White House quest, and for many — including the Nobel peace prize committee — his campaign slogans were the source of great expectations.

Whatever else one might say about Barack Obama’s two victories in his campaigns for the U.S. presidency, they raised the hope, pride, and aspirations of tens of millions of Black Americans in addition to that of many non-Blacks as well. “Hope and change” was the dominant theme of his White House quest, and for many — including the Nobel peace prize committee — his campaign slogans were the source of great expectations.

For many Black Americans the election of the first U.S. Black president was euphoric. A pervasive sense of promise and the expectations for fundamental change were everywhere. A new day and a new dawn were upon us. Here, for instance, is a memoir written by a family friend who watched the presidential election returns the night of November 4, 2008 as they were telecast on a large overhead screen in the heart of New York City’s Harlem:

The night Obama was elected for the first time I stood in Harlem in the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building Square with thousands of Harlemites watching the huge television screen mounted above our heads. … I was awed at the many black men who wept openly. Parents lifted small children in the air and told them to remember this day in history. Some people knelt in prayer. I just felt I finally had personally gotten back at all those who had violated, abused or hated my existence because of the color of my skin. A European media group … approached me because I obviously was an older woman who had experienced more racism than those younger celebrating around me. They wanted to interview me. Though I tried, I could not speak an intelligible sentence, I was too overcome with emotion. … It was a glorious, victorious night! I had lived to see a needed change in this country. My hopes were high for change.

A European media group … approached me because I obviously was an older woman who had experienced more racism than those younger celebrating around me. They wanted to interview me. Though I tried I could not speak an intelligible sentence, I was too overcome with emotion … It was a glorious, victorious night! I had lived to see a needed change in this country. My hopes were high for change.

With hopes raised to such exalted heights, it is no surprise that disappointment would eventually set in. For most Black people, life during the Obama years went on pretty much as it had, with gradually mounting frustration and anger the inevitable result. Even after six years of the Obama presidency, there was little if any fundamental change in the Black standard of living, Black social mobility, Black achievement in the nation’s school system, Black/White race relations, or improvements in the stability and solidarity of Black family ties.

The anger and frustration that resulted from dashed hopes and failed dreams led to a situation whereby minor irritants previously endured. A college building named after an early 20th century U.S. president who shared the White southern view of race relations typical of his time suddenly became intolerable outrages and symbols of extreme and painful oppression.

What was previously viewed as rare and hardly typical cases of rogue cops gunning down innocent and non-threatening Black men came to be identified as an all-pervasive feature of a Black-hating, Black-oppressing, White racist society. Rioting, looting, seizure of college buildings, and the issuance of a host of non-negotiable demands for redress came to be seen by significant numbers of Black people and their White leftist supporters as the understandable — and perhaps even justifiable — response to such provocations.

People who are angry, frustrated, and disappointed often discharge their negative emotions on objects unrelated to the real source of their actual distress. Someone who has had a fight with his boss at work comes home, kicks the cat blocking the path to his favorite easy chair, and screams at his young son for leaving his bicycle in the driveway.

A similar kind of displaced anger and frustration, I believe, was a hidden factor behind much of the heightened racial resentment and Black rage that we have seen since the summer of 2014 on many college campuses and in several U.S. cities. Growing frustration over unrealistic hopes was the “non-constant,” I believe, that helps explain the otherwise inexplicable change in Black behavior. An increase in White racism — the explanation so beloved by the left — explains none of these developments since no such increase has ever been demonstrated and is hardly likely to have occurred.

This situation was in many ways a repeat of the social dynamic that existed in several of the inner-cities of America during the “riot years” of the mid and late 1960s. Then too there was a “revolution of rising expectations” among many Black Americans, one triggered by the unprecedented legislative victories in civil rights during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in many areas of American life, was seen as a milestone in the Black quest for human dignity and equal rights.

Areas covered in its reach included private and public employment, educational institutions receiving government aid, and private businesses deemed to be “public accommodations” like restaurants and hotels. Hopes were also raised the following year by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which assured Blacks the right to vote throughout America, a right effectively denied to them in many of the states of the Old Confederacy.

The passage of these laws, the injustices to which they drew attention, and the hype surrounding their claimed benefits by their most influential supporters led to both a) an exaggerated expectation of immediate positive change, and b) a heightened sensitivity to remaining problems and injustices that the laws did not reach. This combination proved explosive in terms of triggering Black frustration and Black rage that in the years between 1965 and 1969 led to serious Black riots in over a hundred U.S. cities. Paradoxical — and incomprehensible — as it seemed to many, it was precisely in those years in which the social, legal, and economic conditions of Black people advanced most rapidly that Black anger, frustration, and violent behavior reached their peak.

The Tocqueville Effect

One person who would not have been surprised by this 60s-era development was Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his study of the French Revolution first described the relationship between rapidly accelerating expectations and the consequences that often follow from them in terms of frustration, heightened sensitivities, and outwardly directed anger and violence. “It was precisely in those parts of France where there had been most improvements that popular discontent ran highest,” Tocqueville explained about France’s bloody revolution. “This may seem illogical,” he went on, “but history is full of such paradoxes.

Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated. At the height of its power feudalism did not inspire so much hatred as it did on the eve of its eclipse. In the reign of Louis XVI the most trivial pinpricks of arbitrary power caused more resentment than the thoroughgoing despotism of Louis XIV.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution.)

Revolutions of rising expectations are dangerous affairs and may have various causes. The one of the 1960s in America was produced by an array of factors similar to that of late 18th century France but quite different from that of the Obama years. But whatever their source, greatly exaggerated hopes for change and improvement are always in danger of leading to great disappointment and frustration, heightened dissatisfaction with one’s lot in life, and a gross reduction in one’s overall sense of happiness and wellbeing. These in turn can lead to political instability, uncontrolled anger, and often violent social unrest.

It is this dynamic, I believe, which helps to explain much of the racial turmoil we have seen of late on college campuses and in many of our cities, and it is this same dynamic which explains why such seemingly minor irritants as a politically incorrect Halloween costume or a tasteless theme-party at a college fraternity house can unleash such immense hatred, pain, and rage. Tocqueville would have understood it all very well.

Russell K. Nieli is a Senior Preceptor in Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and a Lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department. He is the author of "Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide."

Those of you who wonder what diversity officials do all day must listen to Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University. During first-year orientation, a baffled and tense freshperson asked if she could sing along with a carful of other white people when a song containing the N-word filled the air. “No,” said Marlowe, who applies diversity ethics for groups off campus as well as on.

Marlowe had other nuggets of advice: don’t ask an Asian student for help with your homework and don’t ask a black student if he plays basketball because these acts evoke stereotypes of Asian intellectual competence and black athleticism. Also never use the term “you guys” when addressing a group, because it could imply you are leaving out women.

There’s more: Marlowe thinks careless statements such as, “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” are not just micro-aggressions but also micro-invalidations because they suggest that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes.

This advice came in a New York Times article yesterday by reporter Stephanie Saul, which added this concern about racism negatively affecting college attendance:

“Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri in Columbia — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall.”

This is an odd way of putting it, since we recall only two incidents of racist taunts (and one mysterious swastika) reported before the Mizzou protests, one from a passing car and thus probably not a good barometer of campus racial attitudes.

Most people think applications to the campus are down not because of the two or three incidents in or near a campus of 35,000 students, but because of the turbulent protests and the way they were handled — the abrupt resignation of the university president and chancellor, a hunger strike, the temporary paralysis of the campus and the now famous Melissa Click attempt to bar a photographer from covering events for the school paper.

Reporter Saul adds a dark interpretation of resistance to the diversity tsunami: “Some graduates have curtailed donations and students have suggested that diversity training smacks of some sort of communist re-education program.

The backlash was exemplified recently in a widely publicized letter sent to incoming freshmen at the University of Chicago by the dean of students, John Ellison. The letter clearly rejected the need for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” for an adult student body that should be capable of hearing ideas and concepts contrary to their own.

A communist re-education program, quickly linked to the University of Chicago free-speech letter? Probably not. You would almost think that some reporters can’t resist adding their opinions to stories.

Since its founding by progressive academics 101 years ago, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has had little affection for the governing authorities of colleges and universities. Of course, when college presidents, trustees, and boards of regents bow in submission to its edicts, the AAUP will spare a few words of non-condemnation for the penitents. But for the most part, the AAUP pursues its vision of higher education as best governed by the collective will of the faculty, by which it means the progressive faculty.

The deep roots of this hostility to non-faculty governance are nicely documented in Hans-Joerg Tiede’s recent book, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors. Tiede is an AAUP man through and through, and sees nothing amiss in the organization’s long war for faculty domination of colleges and universities. That war grew out of an earlier time when the non-faculty governing authorities had nearly unbridled control of their institutions, and faculty members served pretty much at the whim of plutocrats, clergy members, or other figures whose commitment to open intellectual inquiry was often dubious.

As Tiede puts it, “Since the beginning of higher education in the United States, institutional governance has ultimately been based on the lay governing board, which in a strictly legal sense, is the university.”

That “strictly legal sense” hasn’t changed despite 101 years of organized pushback by the AAUP and other bodies that aimed to transfer effective power to faculty members. In Tiede’s account, this battle to overcome “the wanton power that presidents and trustees possessed” faltered early on. The founders of the AAUP in this Game of Thrones hoped to secure all the power for the faculty, but a decisive early intervention by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching resulted in college presidents grabbing the scepter from the trustees. Faculty were left with the flyswatter of complaints about academic freedom, job security, and professionalization.

That’s a pretty fair summary of where things have stood for the last century: strong college presidents dominate the boards of trustees and regents who, on paper—but often only on paper—hold the power to govern their institutions. Faculty members have in some cases unionized to present a counterforce to the dominant presidents, but even where they are not unionized, faculty members typically range themselves as an independent third voice under the doctrine of “shared governance.” This doctrine is often given a semblance of authority though formal agreements, but those agreements have also, time and again, proven to be a weak bulwark against college and university administrations.

The AAUP bellyaches about this, but the weakness of the faculty isn’t just an AAUP talking point. Other observers have said much the same thing. In The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (2011) Benjamin Ginsberg inveighed against what he saw as a “surrender” by the faculty to “rampant administrative blight.” Ginsberg, a highly regarded professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, didn’t seem to view the AAUP as a very effective antidote to this blight. He cited a 2009 AAUP conference on academic freedom and shared governance as the equivalent of a Geneva Convention in which the participants hoped the treaty would protect them from “water boarding.” These days the AAUP is investing a lot of effort into organizing adjunct faculty members, hoping against hope to stem the further dilution of faculty power.

Then there is Melissa Click: the unavoidable Melissa Click.

The AAUP membership at its recent annual meeting in Washington DC, voted unanimously to “censure” the University of Missouri at Columbia for—what else?—the decision by its Board of Curators to fire Melissa Click.

The story of Click’s outrageous behavior wasn’t lost on the participants. He call for “some muscle over here” to eject student photojournalist, Tim Tai, from a November 9 Black Lives Matter protest, and her screaming profanities at police officers trying to clear protesters from a public street at a homecoming parade, gave plenty of evidence that she had overstepped her authority as a faculty member. That Click was a hard-core ideologue who had nothing of value to teach Mizzou students didn’t enter into the University’s rationale for firing her, though it ought to raise serious questions about “university governance” that she was ever hired in the first place. Click’s scholarship and teaching involves studies of Lady Gaga and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Knowing all this, the AAUP members (I repeat) unanimously voted to censure the University of Missouri on the grounds that the university had denied Click “academic due process.” Specifically, the AAUP believes that Click should have had the benefit of a faculty hearing, and a year’s salary or a year’s notice.

Let me allow that Mizzou’s Board of Curators might have made some technical mistakes in its firing. One would have to go deep within the wreckage of Mizzou’s governance to see what foolish agreements were signed, what abridgements of governing authority were authorized, and what reckless precedents had been created before one could say with any confidence that the Mizzou Board of Curators acted in a way that didn’t expose them to AAUP’s patented petulance.

But let’s keep in mind that the AAUP’s membership has shown no such urgency in many other situations in which “due process” is in jeopardy. At the same meeting in which the censure of Mizzou passed, the AAUP officially adopted its report, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, which I previously reviewed. This document faults the Office for Civil Rights as well as many colleges and universities for imperiling “due process rights and shared governance.” The peril in the case of OCR’s systematic attack on the presumption of innocence, evidentiary standards, sloppy definitions, and more is many orders of magnitude greater than any inkblots left on Mizzou’s dishonorable discharge of Melissa Click.

But the AAUP has yet to find anyone to censure over abuses of Title IX.

Trustees ‘Come from Different Worlds’

So why the urgency on Click? The Chronicle of Higher Education answers by quoting Howard J. Bunsis, chairman of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress. Bunsis explains. “The attacks are not going to stop.” It seems boards of trustees “come from different worlds than we do.”

Bunsis means that as a bad thing. Imagine: Members of boards of trustees come from a world where college professors are expected to uphold freedom of thought and freedom of expression; where faculty members express some modicum of respect for the rule of law and police officers who are doing their jobs; where persuasion is valued over force; where civility is integral to the exchange of ideas. Perhaps they even come from a world where people possess actual competence in the fields in which they are employed; where “activism” cannot be substituted for scholarship; and where people gain employment in higher education to teach students worthwhile subjects. But if that were the case, it might well be that Bunsis’ worries are well placed. Melissa Click is unlikely to be the only Mizzou faculty member hired to engage trivial research and feckless teaching. As The Federalist headlined the story of her firing, “Melissa Click: One Bad Professor Fired, Thousands to Go.”

So in that sense, the AAUP vote makes perfect sense. But it also reveals the AAUP as a body acting in the spirit of trade unionism to protect its members no matter how incompetent or reprehensible.

The AAUP was in a censorious mood at its convention. It aimed its peashooter not only at Mizzou, but also at the Iowa Board of Regents and the College of Saint Rose in New York, and it leveled a “sanction” against Union County College in New Jersey. The Board of Regents at the University of Iowa hired a new president without adequately involving the faculty. Saint Rose, faced with financial exigencies, laid off 23 professors. Union County College likewise failed to consult faculty members on various matters.

Lapdogs of College Presidents

Let’s remind ourselves of Professor Tiede’s observation: “the lay governing board…in a strictly legal sense is the university.” The governing boards of the great majority of our colleges and universities have for a long time acted as lapdogs of college presidents. Every once in a while a board rouses itself form its usual torpor and attempts to exercise some portion of its legal rights. These steps may be awkward because college and university governing boards are used to the supine position and walking is, at first, a novel experience. But we should encourage the exercise. If they at first knock over a lamp or break a vase, it is a small price to be paid for the prospect that, with a little practice, they will begin to walk upright and hit a steady stride.

I know a good many individual trustees who are ready and able to do this, but they are conjoined to boards that have been padded out with friends of the college president, sports boosters, and sentimentalists who have no real idea of what happens in the classrooms of the institutions they are supposed to oversee. When these independent trustees show some sign of wanting to exercise their authority, bad things happen. In 2008, at Dartmouth, the president successfully launched a board-packing plan, akin to FDR’s court-packing plan.

When the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors in 2012 tried to dismiss its egregious president Teresa Sullivan, she successfully mounted a campaign to be reinstated. Sullivan went on to preside over (and foster) the campus hysteria that followed Rolling Stone’s confabulated account of a rape at a campus fraternity. In 2014, when Regent Wallace Hall at the University of Texas at Austin started asking hard questions about the operations of the university, he was brought up on charges by the Texas House Select Committee on Transparency in State Agency Operations for “misconduct, incompetency in the performance of official duties, or behavior unbefitting” a holder of state office.

A Resurgence of Trustees? Not Really

So challenge a college president’s domination of “governance” is plainly no easy task. The law almost always invests authority in the trustees, but the power is firmly in the hands of the president. Stories about the resurgence of trustee authority need to be taken with a grain of salt. But exceptional events can change that. The catastrophic meltdown of administrative authority at Mizzou was one such instance in which the board was, in effect, forced to step in and exercise its genuine authority. When boards do that, they ought to expect that the AAUP and faculty activists will be incensed. And then they should do it some more.

I say this not because I have such high confidence in our current boards of college trustees, but because I have such low confidence in our current college presidents and college faculties. The presidencies are held in overwhelmingly numbers by careerists who are deeply indebted to the campus grievance marshals and the dynamics of identity-group politics. The faculties are dominated by progressive activists who have intimidated their colleagues into silence. Fear of being labeled a racist, sexist, homophobe, or a conservative keeps nearly everyone in line. The result of all this is that “shared governance” has become a code word for the hard left’s dominion in American higher education. A 101 years ago, the problem may have been “the wanton power” of presidents and trustees. Today it is the wanton power of the faculty activists.

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “Diversity: the Invention of a Concept.”

The University of Missouri has eliminated Respect and Excellence. I have to write this in a hurry because it won’t be long before others will seize on this gift. Respect and Excellence are the names for two residence halls at the University. They are being closed because the University suddenly finds that its enrollments are plummeting. Two other dorms were closed already in light of the crisis.

Let’s bask in the irony for a moment or two longer. The University of Missouri arrived at this juncture by cravenly submitting to the demands of activists and the threats of football players who decided to abet the activists. On November 9, System President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned rather than face down those threats.

Respect—respect for the abiding values of higher education, respect for civic disagreement, respect for intellectual freedom—went on an unpaid leave of absence from the University of Missouri that day. As for Excellence, it wasn’t all that clear that the University of Missouri was a congenial place for Excellence before November 9. But on receiving the news that Demands were moving in, Excellence cancelled her lease and moved out.

I didn’t sleep too well last night, thanks to Heterodox Academy’s (and NYU’s) Jonathan Haidt and John Leo, who recently carried on a provocative exchange in this space. Two questions really bothered me: Why is there so little intellectual diversity in the academy? And what can we do about the related problem of weak university leaders capitulating to ever more outrageous demands from student protesters?

So why is the academy increasingly a leftist monoculture, at least in the social sciences and humanities? The standard answers relate to self-selection: conservatives and libertarians want to make money, so they go into business or the professions, or, more uncharitably, they are not as smart and thus cannot meet academic standards. In short, they are cognitively unfit for a life of the mind. Last month, James Phillips in an excellent paper discredited the latter notion with respect to law-school faculty presenting compelling empirical evidence that conservative underrepresentation amongst law-school faculty likely reflects some ideological discrimination.

Faculty—Wards of the State

One reason discrimination exists is that faculties are in some respects like fraternities—they like to have people around them with similar tastes and preferences; people who are simpatico ideologically probably will be closer colleagues and friends.

But it goes beyond that: faculty are increasingly wards of the state. They derive their income in large part directly or indirectly from governmental largess even at so-called private schools. Progressives favor big governments; big governments shower more dollars onto college campuses, providing larger salaries and lower teaching loads for academics. Those on the left push for free college and loan forgiveness; those on the right talk about restricting student-loan programs. The progressive view promotes larger enrollments and budgets, and with that more and higher-paid faculty. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

That brings me to the problem of recent student protests and the spineless reactions of presidents of prestigious universities like Yale. As temperatures rise this spring, protests will mount (our fragile students don’t want to discomfort themselves by protesting in the cold). Continued appeasement of students who seize control of buildings and curriculum and threaten university leaders destroys the rule of campus law and further reduces intellectual diversity and academic freedom. What can be done?

More Adult Supervision

I agree with Jonathan Haidt: bring in some adult supervision. Specifically, trustees and prominent alumni were educated when children were not protected by their parents from hearing or seeing hurtful things, when kids were raised to endure hardships and occasional blows to their self-esteem. By and large, I suspect trustees and large donors do not approve of coddling students. And one thing trumps everything else on campus: money. You don’t offend big donors

Typically, trustees rubber stamp administrative actions, and are seen but not heard. But they have significant power that needs to be unleashed: to borrow from a misguided University of Missouri professor, “Let’s have some muscle over here.” Presidents should be told in no uncertain terms that groups of spoiled brats cannot be allowed to ignore university procedures, disrupt operations, and threaten unfettered scholarly inquiry.

The problem ultimately is one of ownership. Radical students think they own the university. Faculty think they own or co-own it. Senior administrators think they are the owners, as sometimes so do powerful wealthy alumni. Universities earn financial surpluses that get disbursed to the putative owners, much like the dividends corporations pay to stockholders. That is what “shared governance” is all about –give the faculty low teaching loads and good salaries, administrators armies of junior administrators to do the heavy lifting, students low workloads and good recreational facilities, and the alumni a good football team. Everyone is happy except those paying the outrageous bills.

But for non-representative groups of students to claim an absolute right to determine major policies in return for not using violence is extortion. The legal owners of universities need to assert themselves and tell the presidents to show leadership and not let the lunatics run the asylum.

Richard Vedder directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, teaches at Ohio University, and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Vedder directed the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and teaches economics at Ohio University. He is also an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The students at Mizzou and Yale caught in twin episodes of contrived campus racial hysteria have been described as narcissists and self-indulgent brats catered to by their parents who told them how special they were and expecting the same judgment from college. Handed what they understand as the attitudinal keys to the kingdom, they’re enraged when challenged.

The two highlights are probably 1) the would-be Maoist Missouri media studies professor calling for “the muscle” to shut down coverage of a protest by a young journalist invoking the First Amendment and 2) the Yale student shrieking “who the fuck hired you” at a professor so foolish as to suggest that the subject of culturally appropriate Halloween costumes for Yale’s overgrown brats was in part a matter of free speech. Like President Obama insisting he “can’t wait” for Congress before overriding the Constitution to impose himself through executive authority, “the snowflake totalitarians” insist that its fears need to be propitiated forthwith. Fortunately, both incidents were caught on camera and have gone viral on YouTube.

These young people in America’s increasingly hierarchical society expect to be obeyed. Treated as important customers by their colleges, their faculty and staff assume the customer is always right. What makes their effluvia different from those of the 1960s student protesters is that the context has changed. Then as now, students, short on experience, are often unable to distinguish between considered political perspectives and their emotion-laden ideologies.

But in the 1960s the faculty still had a few conservatives and a fair number of old-line liberals scarred by McCarthyism and firmly wedded to freedom of speech. But 45 years later academic self-selection has produced faculties and over-staffed administrations that devolve from protestors of 1970. The student protestors are an expression of what academia has been producing over these past decades.

In recent years, academia has done so much to discredit itself that we might have expected calls for reform to be ringing from the halls of Congress. “Federal spending,” notes The Journal, “on loans and grants, on an inflation-adjusted basis, has jumped more than 50% over the past decade to $134 billion last year, and total federal student-loan debt has hit $1.2 trillion.”

On the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has spoken for new and better subsidies and perhaps even some student debt forgiveness at a time when the national debt has doubled in the past seven years. On the GOP side, Marco Rubio referred in passing, during Tuesday’s Republican debate, to delivering commodified higher education more efficiently. And to be sure, former Indiana Governor and now Purdue University president Mitch Daniels has talked on unbundling the services purportedly provided by higher education so that they can be delivered more efficiently. There are proposals for Contractor model in which “The core business function of the contractor-college would be assembly and quality control rather than running an institution and hiring faculty or holding classes.”

But given the endless scandals and massive failures, there’s been strikingly little political outcry. That’s in part because the average lawmaker has twelve institution of higher learning in his or her district. These institutions are often in close touch with local elected officials who are well aware of how many jobs the colleges account for. Nationally, counting only the four-year operations, colleges are the sixth largest industry in America. They employ 3.6 million people, more than one of every 40 workers in the U.S.

“Higher” education has become a very big business and its size and economic influence has been expressed in its political clout. “Colleges and universities,” explained The Journal, “have become one of the most effective lobbying forces in Washington, employing more lobbyists last year than any other industries except drug manufacturing and technology.” Last year colleges and universities deployed more than a thousand lobbyists at a cost of 73 million dollars. The upshot is that from George Bush the first to Barack Obama’s attempts to rank schools based on supposed outcomes, every effort at accountability has been beaten back.

In the event that reform comes to academia, it will be borne on the wings of competition. On the matter of free speech, the University of Chicago has recently distinguished itself with a strong embrace of traditional notions of free speech. Other colleges like Hillsdale in Michigan, which takes no federal money has made a name for itself by teaching about the genius of the Founding Fathers. If academia is to dig itself out of the hole it’s put itself in to, it will be because many more colleges decide to opt out of the suicidal spiral all too visible at Missouri and Yale.

Fred Siegel is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership, a City Journal contributing editor, and an expert on public policy solutions for urban governance. A former fellow at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he is currently scholar-in-residence at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn.

“The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all the way down to, er, less-than-elite ones like Mizzou. They created this Frankenstein monster, and it’s up to them to kill it before it kills them.”
— Robert Tracinski, The Federalist

Yesterday, I wrote about Yale students who decided, in the name of creating a “safe space” on compass, to spit on people as they left a talk with which they disagreed. “In their muddled ideology,” I wrote, “the Yale activists had to destroy the safe space to save it
—Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic

Some friends (at the University of Missouri) tell me they are afraid to voice their opinions lest they come under fire from the administration or peers – or the police. The University of Missouri police department sent an email urging students to report offensive or hurtful speech – not because it is illegal – but so the Office of Student Conduct could take disciplinary action against these students. Several of us are afraid to disagree with other students, who in turn may report us to the authorities so we can be “dealt with.” Many students have told me they are also afraid to speak out against the protest narrative, afraid they will be called “racist” and become campus pariahs. What’s lost is honest dialogue.—Ian Paris, U. of Missouri student, The College Fix

“I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they’re calling the ‘Yale snowflakes’: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It’s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today’s creepy campus intolerance; it’s you who made these monsters.”
— Brendan O’Neill, Spiked

I do not understand the student demands at the University of Missouri. From the published reports, the students are mad that University System President Tim Wolfe refused to get out of his car during a homecoming parade when protestors physically blocked his car. Where I come from, blocking his car is illegal and hostile. What would be the response if a group of white students surrounded an African-American administrator’s car and demanded instant dialogue? Is the new standard that when some redneck students hurl disgusting racial slurs at minority students the president is responsible and loses his job? Is demanding the president step down simply because he is white not a toxic form of bias and prejudice itself?
— William Choslovsky, letter to Minding the Campus